Debt collection cases dominate state court civil dockets in Massachusetts and across the country. Extant scholarship regarding debt collection in the courts has focused on what makes it easy for creditors to churn out this \u201cassembly line litigation,\u201d including repeat plaintiffs and passive courts. Some light has also been shed on creditors\u2019 counsel in these cases, highlighting how debt collection \u201cmills\u201d dominate dockets and rely on non-lawyer staff. However, it is not the handful of attorneys at collection firms that appear for the average court hearing in debt collection cases. Instead, debt collection mills hire substitute attorneys, also known as coverage attorneys or appearance attorneys, to make the bulk of their appearances in court. The pervasive use of such attorneys is a practice largely unique to collection cases and, along with non-lawyer staff at collection firms, is the engine that runs assembly-line debt collection litigation in Massachusetts and across much of the country. This Article relies on information gleaned through interviews with industry actors to shed light on the coverage attorney system. It posits that there are multiple ethical problems with the use of coverage attorneys and that their use compromises the rules of professional responsibility. To conclude, this Article argues for reform and better enforcement of existing rules to rein in the untethered use of coverage attorneys.<\/p>\n